You'd think it's just about knitting and travel, but it's really about life, love, faith...and food

Friday, March 6, 2015

Zoom Loom Shelby Sheep Kit from The Woolery - Day 4

Beware the sheeping mantis...!

I am a very good knitter, but I rot at crafts.

The trouble with sheep assembly, in this case, is that it feels very much like arts and crafts. Actually, it feels like an invitation to an appearance on Pinterest Fail. I just know this is not going to turn out as sweet and charming as the picture on the kit package.

The body and legs were pure geometry. Make a tube. Sew ends on the tube. Stuff said tube. Make two rectangles. Wrap pipe cleaners with the rectangles and sew them shut. Bend wrapped pipe cleaners into legs and sew them onto the body. These things went relatively as planned.

The head however, gave me fits. I worked it twice, and even then it looked, well, not exactly sheepish. The real kicker came when I showed it to my husband, who got that not-quite-hidden “what is that?” expression on his face parents know all too well. We use it when our toddler children show us a blue blob from finger painting. We apply that face until they tell us “it’s an elephant,” after which we gush about “Well of course it is! What a pretty blue elephant!”

My better half looked at the black body for a moment until he pronounced the head looked like…a praying mantis. And, don’t you know, he was right. I had a sheep body with a praying mantis head—something out of a horrid 1950’s sci-fi flick or the Don Dixon song. For the whole next day, every time I looked at the thing, I saw “sheeping mantis.”

Finally, after looking up half a dozen photos of sheep, I realized it was the ears. I'm going tack the ears to flop down. Then I'll have a sheep. Or something close to a sheep. At least something closer to a sheep than to a praying mantis.

The fleece will save me. No one thinks of a fluffy, fleecy praying mantis.